Laura Parker

All Work

It’s not enough that Internet companies have entered every corner of human existence—now, some are starting to cater to non-existence. In recent years, Google and Facebook have created systems to deal with death, such as suspending inactive accounts and allowing people…

Earlier this year, a minor injury to my right eye left me temporarily blind. I could do little but sit in bed and listen to audio books, until someone told me about the video game BlindSide, which doesn’t, in fact, contain any video. It is a meticulously designed, audio-driven…

The critic Roger Ebert once drew a crucial distinction between video games and art: he said that the ultimate objective of a video game—unlike that of a book, film, or poem—is to achieve a high score, vaporize falling blocks, or save the princess. Art, he argued, cannot…